Sunday, January 15, 2017

Barack Obama is riding off on a wave of glory. The media is
pushing the narrative that Obama really was the Messiah—and thus that the media
was right, the American people notwithstanding.

And the same media have been peddling the story that Donald
Trump is the Antichrist. Thus must mean that they are looking forward to the Second
Coming of Christ… after they destroy the Antichrist.

As always, all good things are to the credit of Barack
Obama. All bad things are the fault of Republicans, whether Trump or G. W.
Bush.

It is such a flagrant lie that it rates with the notion that
Hillary Clinton was the most qualified presidential candidate in American
history. Anyone who believed that suffers from a thought disorder.

Today, the national hue and cry is directed against Russia. Obama
spent eight years ceding authority and power to Russia (and to China, if you
wish). The picture of an all-powerful
Russia—one that was pulling the strings in the American election by
manipulating a weakened American mind-- makes clear that Obama yielded to Russia, just
as he yielded to Iran and just as he let the Chinese do what they wanted.
Attacks on Russia show that Obama made Russia powerful.

Incidentally, how did it happen that, according to this
scenario, the American mind is so easily manipulated?

And now Obama’s supporters are insisting that Donald Trump
get into a fight with Russia. They have been attacking Rex Tillerson for being
soft on Russia. Mostly, this is coming from the left, the same left that
cheered Barack Obama’s retreat from world leadership. Though naturally, John McCain and Lindsey Graham have hopped on the bandwagon.

Where Trump seems to be reviving the policy of détente, even
Republicans like Marco Rubio are beating the drums for toughness against
Russia. For the record, Rubio’s mindless insistence that prospective Secretary
of State Rex Tillerson declare Vladimir Putin a war criminal tells us that many
people seriously overestimated the political savvy of Marco Rubio. Can you
imagine an American Secretary of State making his opening gambit in a
negotiation with Putin the statement that Putin is a war criminal?

Anyway, the long knives are out for Donald Trump. Leftist
forces have been in overdrive trying to discredit his election and to undermine
his administration… even before it starts. It tells us that however much
Barack Obama was courtly and eloquent and reasonable in his own comportment, he
was ultimately a divisive president.

Anyway, the other night on Tucker Carlson’s show, many of us
saw a conversation between Tucker and Stephen Cohen. See this link also. Cohen is a retired
academic, an expert on Russia, who often writes for The Nation—which is not a
publication of the alt-right. As it happens, Cohen is married to Katrina vanden
Heuvel, the publisher of The Nation.

Cohen believes that Trump wants to pursue a policy of détente
toward Russia, a policy that was first practiced by Richard Nixon,that was
denounced but eventually revived by Ronald Reagan. But, he says that certain
forces do not want this to happen and are trying to delegitimize the Trump
administration in order to produce a new Cold War. Moreover, Cohen suggests,
those who are blaming Putin are trying to find someone to blame for the failure
of the Obama administration foreign policy.

In a previous article Cohen claimed that we should direct
our efforts against Radical Islamist terrorism and not at Russia. He might have also singled
out the dimwits who want to fight climate change and who submit to Islam. The
Obama administration has gotten itself far more lathered up over Islamophobia
than it has over Islamist terrorism.

Anyway, it is worth our while to examine Cohen’s take on the
current dustup about Russia, beginning with the leaked Buzzfeed allegations. Cohen
sees a campaign to undermine the Trump presidency and to produce a new Cold War:

Two
conflicting interpretations are suggested, says Cohen. Either Trump is about to
become a potentially seditious American president. Or powerful US forces are
trying to destroy his presidency before it begins, perhaps even prevent him
from taking office. Even if the allegations are eventually regarded as untrue,
they may permanently slur and thus cripple Trump as a foreign-policy president,
especially in trying to diminish the exceedingly dangerous new Cold War with
Russia, which would constitute a grave threat to US national
security—particularly in an existential nuclear confrontation like the Cuban
missile crisis of 1962. If anti-Trump American forces are behind untrue
allegations of this magnitude, those forces are the primary enemies of US
national security and should be investigated fully and publicly.

If we believe the vilification campaign, Vladimir Putin put
Donald Trump in the White House because he considered Hillary Clinton the
greater threat. If you really believe that Putin was manipulating it all from
behind the scenes you have to believe that he was most threatened by Hillary
Clinton. As you know the Russians have consistently treated Hillary and John
Kerry and Barack Obama with nothing but contempt.

Cohen offers this analysis:

Two
conflicting interpretations are suggested, says Cohen. Either Trump is about to
become a potentially seditious American president. Or powerful US forces are
trying to destroy his presidency before it begins, perhaps even prevent him
from taking office. Even if the allegations are eventually regarded as untrue,
they may permanently slur and thus cripple Trump as a foreign-policy president,
especially in trying to diminish the exceedingly dangerous new Cold War with
Russia, which would constitute a grave threat to US national
security—particularly in an existential nuclear confrontation like the Cuban
missile crisis of 1962.

The American left is playing the only card it has left: the
politics of defamation. We should evaluate the consequences:

Cohen
points out that even before the latest “revelation” there has been an
unprecedented media campaign to defame Trump as a would-be traitor in his
relations with Russia. On the night of January 4, a CNN paid contributor
characterized the next president as a Russian “fifth columnist”—no one on the
panel dissented or demurred.

Subsequently, Washington Post columnists warned that Trump might have
committed “treason” as president or replicate with Putin the Nazi-Soviet Pact
of 1939. Another set out the articles of his impeachment even before his
inauguration. Here, too, nothing so poisonous, or potentially detrimental to
national security, or to the presidency itself, has occurred in modern American
history.

Everyone has been saying that Trump needs to accept the
conclusions offered by the intelligence community uncritically. Cohen disagrees,
suggesting that Trump is right to remain skeptical:

US
national security requires a president who is able to evaluate critically
intelligence reports or have people around him who can do so. Whether Trump and
his appointees are such people is a separate question.

Cohen considers Tillerson to be well qualified to be
Secretary of State:

Cohen
counters that the United States does not need a friend in the Kremlin but a
national-security partner whose national interests are sufficiently mutual for
sustained cooperation—détente instead of Cold War. In this regard, Tillerson,
whose success was based on reconciling national interests, would appear to be
well qualified, though he too is defamed for suggesting any kind of cooperation
with Moscow, no matter the benefits to US national security.

One notes that Andrew Young, an icon in the civil rights movement,
also supports Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State:

So, for
me, an "Oil Man" as Secretary of State is a "Stone of
Hope."

Statecraft
has a tendency to be moralistic. Business is more pragmatic, seeking mutual
self-interest rather than arguing absolutes of right or wrong.

I offer these views because they do not come from Trump
supporters. In the current cacophony of threats and posturing, it is becoming
increasingly difficult to find people who can see beyond moral absolutes.

3 comments:

Cohen: "Or powerful US forces are trying to destroy his presidency before it begins, perhaps even prevent him from taking office." We know THIS is true, given what the Democrats are saying, their media minions are repeating, and other minions doing.